House on Haunted Hill (1959)
I fell in love with the wacky low-budget horror films of the 1950s and 60s as a kid, when public domain chillers aired late at night and I secretly stayed up to watch them on the tiny black-and-white TV in my room. I didn’t pay much attention to the filmmakers behind them then, but by the time Matinee (1993) hit theaters I was in college and knew enough to recognize a tribute to horror king William Castle, who never met a gimmick he didn’t like. House on Haunted Hill (1959) is probably the most famous and widely available of Castle’s horror pictures, and it’s a great favorite at my house, especially around Halloween. What could be more fun than Vincent Price and Elisha Cook, Jr. in a spooky house full of possible ghosts and at least one very real murderer? It’s not particularly scary by modern horror standards, but House on Haunted Hill has all the charm of an old school haunted house ride, with jump scares, skeletons, bleeding ceilings, and lots of macabre humor.
Vincent Price takes the lead as wealthy Frederick Loren, who invites a select group of guests to spend the night at a supposedly haunted house. Although his wife, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart), dislikes Frederick’s plans, the rest of the party agree to attend because Frederick promises to pay each of them $10,000 if they stay until morning. The owner of the house, Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook, Jr.), warns the others that the ghosts are eager to add to their number, and soon enough strange happenings set everyone on edge, especially young Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig). When Annabelle is found hanged in the middle of the night, the guests realize that a murderer must be hiding among them.
House on Haunted Hill boasts a surprisingly good cast for a low-budget horror movie, with Price in fine form as the sardonic party host. Carol Ohmart radiates ice cold beauty and malice as Annabelle; she and Price have some delightfully scathing scenes together early in the picture, and it’s great fun to see how much they loathe one another as they trade pet names and barbed remarks. Elisha Cook, Jr. cracks up brilliantly as the traumatized Watson, who serves as the keeper of the house’s gruesome history and a true believer in its supernatural residents. Julie Mitchum, sister of the more famous Robert, drinks her way through a series of scotches as Ruth Bridges, while Alan Marshal frequently opines about hysteria as the psychiatrist David Trent. There’s a budding romance between Carolyn Craig’s Nora and Lance, a dashing pilot played by Richard Long, although their all-American normalcy is threatened by the weird things that keep happening to an increasingly terrified Nora. While Castle even credits the skeleton for playing itself, I have to give props to silent film veteran Leona Anderson, here making her final screen appearance as the aptly named Mrs. Slydes. She has no lines, but she sure can make an entrance.
The solid cast and Castle’s trademark gimmicks breathe new life into the familiar “old dark house” genre that springs from classic Gothic tales of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its original theatrical run, Castle rigged “Emergo” effects that flew a skeleton over the audience at key moments (feel free to have a friend throw a plastic skeleton over the couch if you need to recreate this effect at home). House on Haunted Hill continues the tradition of films like The Cat and the Canary (1927), The Old Dark House (1932), The Ghost Walks (1934), and many others that depict a group of people spending the night in a spooky mansion, although the crowning achievement of the genre would come a few years later with The Haunting (1963). Without spoiling too much of the plot, I’ll point out that House on Haunted Hill is also an example of a type of Gothic first mastered by the novelist Ann Radcliffe, in which the appearance of the supernatural is eventually explained to the reader/audience. Radcliffe’s 1794 novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, is still a great read if you want to dive deep into the genre’s history.For the original old dark house in Gothic fiction, you have to go even farther back to Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto, which involves such spectacular supernatural events that I wish William Castle had made a film adaptation of it. Walpole and Castle would have been a match made in spooky Gothic heaven, and Vincent Price could even have played the villain.
Castle actually directed his own version of The Old Dark House in 1963, but of his other films I especially enjoy The Tingler (1959), which also stars Vincent Price, and 13 Ghosts (1960), just because it’s bonkers. If you want even more, try Mr. Sardonicus (1961) and Strait-Jacket (1964). Several of Castle’s pictures have been remade, but I much prefer the originals, even if the 1999 House on Haunted Hill features Geoffrey Rush looking a lot like Vincent Price. If you love campy classic horror but haven’t yet seen it, I absolutely recommend tracking down Matinee, in which John Goodman plays the showman inspired by William Castle.
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— Jennifer Garlen for Classic Movie Hub
Jennifer Garlen pens our monthly Silver Screen Standards column. You can read all of Jennifer’s Silver Screen Standards articles here.
Jennifer is a former college professor with a PhD in English Literature and a lifelong obsession with film. She writes about classic movies at her blog, Virtual Virago, and presents classic film programs for lifetime learning groups and retirement communities. She’s the author of Beyond Casablanca: 100 Classic Movies Worth Watching and its sequel, Beyond Casablanca II: 101 Classic Movies Worth Watching, and she is also the co-editor of two books about the works of Jim Henson.
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